Bankruptcy and the dropped charges is the sequence John Kiriakou identifies as the decisive fact about his own prosecution.
The sequence
Kiriakou was charged in January 2012 with five felonies, including three counts of espionage — charges that, as he notes, can carry the death penalty. He has said that ten months later he went bankrupt under the weight of $1.15 million in legal fees, and that as soon as he went bankrupt the government dropped the espionage charges. [1]
In a second telling he compresses the same point still further: that they waited until he went bankrupt before they dropped the charges. [2]
The inference
Kiriakou’s reading is that the charges were never expected to survive. He points to the discovery materials, in which John Brennan wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder telling him to charge Kiriakou with espionage; Holder replied that his lawyers did not believe Kiriakou had committed espionage; and Brennan replied telling him to charge him anyway and make him defend himself. [3] [1]
He generalises the mechanism: that when going against the federal government it is impossible to outlast it, and cites a conviction rate of 98.2 per cent, which he attributes to unlimited resources rather than to the merits. [2]
What he was left with
What remained after the espionage counts fell away was a single count under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, arising from an email exchange with an author writing about the Abu Omar rendition. [1] Kiriakou has said elsewhere that his own concession about the case was that he had confirmed a name rather than exposed one. [4]